Farage's rhetoric is certainly satisfying, and aspects of his platform are great.

A couple points though:

- this was a by-election, where the sitting MP defecting to UKIP had an established "brand" with his constituency.

- the EU is imploding economically right now, spiraling into dysfunction. If this trajectory continues, then "Euroscepticism" will become official Tory policy (as well as simple self-preservation logic), and the Conservative party will simply co-opt the issue.

- this was a by-election, where the sitting MP defecting to UKIP had an established "brand" with his constituency

This is true, however he defected from the Conservative Party who also ran a candidate. The "defector" received 21,113 votes while the Conservative received 8,709. That's a huge margin and the turnout was 51% which is high for a by-election. Obviously "name" and "brand" probably helped but I think the numbers add weight to the UKIP win.

Plus there was a second by-election in a rock solid Labour constituency, where the Labour candidate almost lost to the UKIP candidate. The difference in votes was around 600, those numbers tell a tale as well.